Читать книгу A Change in the Cabinet онлайн

25 страница из 64

There was more: To his hatred of hazard and to his stern sense of duty and unbending industry, he added something of that daring which has made for the greatness of the blood in all its adventures Overseas, and for no branch more than for the Scotch-Irish.

He would boldly advance sums in blind confidence of the future, the mere total of which would have appalled a lesser man, and he would as boldly withdraw them to the ruin of prosperous concerns, where another would have been content to let production take its own course. And this fine command of cash and of credit which he used as a General uses an army, had in it something of personal courage; for towards the latter part of his life, when he had come to control a vast private fortune, it was imperative that in many a bold conception he himself should stand to lose or gain.

At the moment when his only daughter left her happy Belgian convent to be presented at the Court of St. James, he was, though at the height of his fortunes, a lonely and to some extent an embittered man.